Gifts to Science Researchers Have Strings, Study Finds

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

Published: April 1, 1998

WASHINGTON, March 31—
It is an axiom of politics that money buys influence and that gifts come with strings attached. The same is not supposed to be true of academic medical research, but a new study finds that in science, as in the rest of life, money expects to talk.

In an anonymous survey, more than half of the university scientists who received gifts from drug or biotechnology companies admitted that the donors expected to exert influence over their work, including review of academic papers before publication and patent rights for commercial discoveries.

''That is very serious,'' said Dr. Sheldon Krimsky, a professor of urban and environmental policy at Tufts University who studies the relationship between industry and academia. ''It suggests that somebody who gave a drug or a cell culture or a piece of equipment should have some oversight, and that is a very serious problem for the independence of the researcher.''

The study, by researchers at Harvard University and the University of Minnesota and being published on Wednesday in The Journal of the American Medical Association, is the first to examine the murky relationship between corporations that give gifts and the scholars who receive them. It is based on the responses of 2,167 scientists who work at 50 research-intensive universities.

Among those surveyed, 43 percent had received a gift -- typically biomaterials, like cell lines or snippets of DNA, laboratory equipment, trips or money -- in the three years before the survey. Two-thirds of the recipients reported that the gift was either important or very important to their work, a finding that the authors said revealed how much some academics depended on industry help.

The study did not assess the gifts' worth. But the strings attached ran the gamut from requests that the scientist test the company's products to stipulations that donated materials or equipment not be shared.

One-third of the 920 scientists who received the gifts said their corporate benefactors expected to review their academic papers before publication. And, in one finding deemed particularly troubling, 19 percent said the donors wanted the patent rights to commercial discoveries stemming from use of the gift, even though most universities had rules that prevent the faculty from giving away such intellectual property.

''All of this is extremely worrisome,'' said Dr. Sidney M. Wolfe, director of Public Citizen's Health Research Group, a monitoring organization in Washington ''It tells me that there is almost no sphere of our health care research and delivery system that is immune from the infecting properties of money. It is ultimately dangerous to the patient, for whom biomedical research is done.''

Unlike research grants and contracts, gifts are largely unregulated by universities and have typically been dismissed as insignificant.

Dr. David Blumenthal, associate professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School and one of the study's authors, said: ''We have devoted a lot of time and attention to trying to sort out the formal written arrangements that occur between universities and industry, but we have missed a part of the issue that operates beneath the radar. A company can give a gift of almost any amount of money or any type of thing to a faculty member, and it goes unobserved.''

The study did not ask researchers if they complied with the donors' requests. But it comes at a time of increasing scrutiny of the financial links between university scientists and pharmaceutical or biotech companies. Just last month, the Food and Drug Administration issued new rules requiring doctors who test new drugs and devices to disclose whether they have received stock, consulting fees or other financial support from the manufacturers.

Such ties are growing ever more common; in a 1996 analysis of 789 scientific journal articles, Dr. Krimsky found that for 34 percent of the articles, one or more authors had a financial interest -- most frequently a patent pending -- in the subject matter being studied.

How much, if any, control a corporation should have over academic research is a touchy subject at many universities. In one controversy that received widespread news coverage last year, Dr. Betty Dong, a pharmacy professor at the University of California at San Francisco, signed an agreement giving Boots Pharmaceuticals, Inc., now the Knoll Pharmaceutical company, control over publication of a study involving one of its thyroid medications.

When the study found the drug worked no better than cheaper generics, the company, which paid for Dr. Dong's work, suppressed the findings, then reversed itself amid public outcry. While most instances of corporate interference in academia are not so clear-cut, there are frequent clashes that never make the news.

''The whole nature of industry and academic relations is changing,'' said Christopher Scott, director of research development for the Stanford University Medical Center. Mr. Scott's job is to negotiate contracts with companies that offer Stanford researchers grants for scientific research, while at the same time protecting the university's scientists from signing away too much academic freedom.

It is not uncommon, Mr. Scott said, for a company to ask to review the contents of an academic article before publication; he typically insists that the review take no longer than 60 to 90 days, in keeping with a guideline set forth by the National Institutes of Health.

But if a company wants patent rights to a discovery, the answer is a flat-out no.

''That is one thing Stanford is dead set against,'' Mr. Scott said, although the university will grant a corporate sponsor exclusive rights to market commercial discoveries.

While Stanford has a policy that gifts must come without strings, donations to individual scientists come outside Mr. Scott's purview and, he said, are more difficult to monitor.

''There has been, in essence, a gray market of research based on gifts for many, many years,'' Mr. Scott said, adding that universities should draft clear policies about gifts.

That is a recommendation Dr. Blumenthal and his co-authors make in this week's study. But even when universities do have policies, conflicts arise. At the University of California at San Francisco, where the controversy over the thyroid drug occurred, a policy has been in place for the last 24 years requiring faculty members to file disclosure forms that reveal their financial relationships with industry.

But the policy only covers cash, not other gifts, like equipment, trips or biomaterials. And in an editorial accompanying the Journal of the American Medical Association study, Dr. Lisa Bero of the Institute for Health Policy Studies at the San Francisco campus complained that some scholars who had ''clearly defined and substantial financial conflicts of interest'' described their relationships to their corporate sponsors as trivial.

Others, Dr. Bero wrote, err on the side of caution: ''Some even report the receipt of free coffee cups.''